Author
Topic: A Shout-out to coop multiplayer gaming

Every since my girlfriend and I moved in together, both of us have been doing most of our gaming together, and really enjoying it. Both of us love games and have similar taste. Similarly, we both love story/adventure/rpgs and we're not big on competitive multiplayer. Unfortunately, there's a distinct lack of games that are coop multiplayer, and they are getting scarcer and scarcer. As far as I can remember, some of my favorite gaming experiences have been coop multiplayer. From blazing through Halo with a friend, to going night after night with the awesome coop mode of Twisted Metal Black, I had a lot of real bonding moments playing games together with friends. The problem with competitive multiplayer is that both parties must be at a similar level to really enjoy it, or one will always trounce the other and there will always be an awkward dichotomy. Many times, it's one person who owns the game, so they will obviously be far more adept, and competition just doesn't feel fair: "Come over to my house so I can kick your ass". Coop multiplayer always took the social stress and awkwardness out of multiplayer gaming.

In my case, I've been gaming a lot longer than my girlfriend, and have a lot more experience with action games (she's almost entirely played turn based RPGs and point-and-click adventure games), so it's really no fun for us to go head to head. Also, we appreciate long-term experiences: TV shows, epic games that take weeks for the story and gameplay to unfold, etc.

Yet a lot of this seems to be dying out. More games centered around the dudebro attitude of "Let's Fight!" Less and less offline coop multiplayer definitely erodes a growing demographic. However, we've been absolutely loving Borderlands, and it's a real breath of fresh air that a whole popular series has been created with multiplayer in mind. I've been thinking about picking up an old Xbox 360 (mine died a few years back) and replaying the Halo series with her. Unfortunately, we were really bummed to hear that Destiny shipped without offline coop multiplayer. And even though I've started her playing Smash Brawl: Subspace Emissary, it doesn't look like we'll have much reason to get Smash WiiU any time soon.

I'd love to hear a few awesome suggestions of coop games that we can play together.

Resident Evil 5 and 6 ...are ...what they are offline, but together it's a ton of fun and really milks the "togetherness" idea (the amateur difficulty makes things more casual and fun>tense, but higher difficulties are there too)

Kirby Super Star was one of my favourites as a kid and I think it holds up well today, as well as Secret of Mana

The Lego series has really fun co-op and is a really nice light-hearted take on the source material (Lord of the Rings being a really beautiful imagining of Middle Earth).

Borderlands is there of course

Dragon's Crown is co-op. Not the easiest and I'm not sure if she'd be put off by some of the imagery and lack of...really much going on. But it's a great game that makes you put in as much as get back from it.

Kirby sounds great. We totally loved Epic Yarn... and I guess we've avoided everything else for fear of nothing living up to that, but that's a great suggestion!

Margaret is starting to get really comfortable with first person through Borderlands, though, and she loves beating the SHIT out of things. Ironically, she plays Brick, I play Lilith! I think she's soon going to be fairly comfortable with far more action-oriented games, it's just newer for her.

Oh, don't worry about imagery. Her favorite movies are things like Hellraiser and The Grudge. It's me that starts to get squeamish with that kind of stuff! Never been a huge fan of Zombie stuff. Though I was really liking Last of Us before my save file got corrupted 2/3rds of the way through :(

Personally I loved Dragon Crown's co-op. Playing that game single-player can get dull quickly, but it was made for co-op. It does ultimately get repetitive but it's the interactions with other players that make it interesting.

This is a bit of a different genre, but how about Portal 2? The co-op campaign in that is fantastic (way better than the single-player to be honest). And if you get the PS3 version then you can do couch co-op. I don't think that's possible with the PC version but correct me if I'm wrong.

OMG, I totally forgot about Crystal Chronicles. Man I wanted to play that game, but had no one to play it with, and agreed that needing the GBA to serve as a controller was terrible, though I have to wonder if it wasn't from the GBA working as a controller for the GC that gave Nintendo the idea of the DS.

Along that vein, Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures for GC comes to mind. I begged and pleaded and finally found a friend to play it with. It was really fun minus the fact that you will need GBAs to play multiplayer for it similarly to FF:CC. I still never could figure out why you could play single-player with the GC controller, but had to have GBAs for multiplayer.

OMG, I totally forgot about Crystal Chronicles. Man I wanted to play that game, but had no one to play it with, and agreed that needing the GBA to serve as a controller was terrible, though I have to wonder if it wasn't from the GBA working as a controller for the GC that gave Nintendo the idea of the DS.

Along that vein, Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures for GC comes to mind. I begged and pleaded and finally found a friend to play it with. It was really fun minus the fact that you will need GBAs to play multiplayer for it similarly to FF:CC. I still never could figure out why you could play single-player with the GC controller, but had to have GBAs for multiplayer.

The problem with Four Swords Adventure is that, much like the various Mario Party/Kart games over the years, its amazingly cutthroat. Nintendo seems to have cornered the market on friendship destroying games.

(And you know that I would never have recommended FF:CC without LoZ:FSA without good reason, and "Did not fit the OP's request" is among the good reasons (the other being the lack of a third, let alone fourth, player).)

With all our hardware combined friends and I actually managed to play Crystal Chronicles and Four Swords Adventures together (2-4 players, depending on the circumstances). It was so much fun when we were on the same wavelenth and got epic shot done! My main problem was that I was the only one with an old GBA instead of a SP and always had trouble seeing what was happening on my screen ~_~